Since the bacteria that cause urinary tract infections are getting more and more resistant to many antibiotics, they are becoming more and more difficult to cure.

In ACS Central Science, scientists now describe the discovery of a novel drug that fights drug-resistant bacteria in lab settings as well as in mice suffering from pneumonia and UTIs.

According to the researchers, this molecule, fabimycin, could one day be used to treat difficult infections in humans.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, gram-negative bacteria are a group of bacteria that cause illnesses like pneumonia, urinary tract infections, and bloodstream infections in millions of people worldwide.

These bacteria have powerful defensive mechanisms, including hard cell walls that keep the majority of drugs out and pumps that effectively remove those antibiotics that do get inside, making them particularly challenging to treat.

The bacteria can also change through mutation in order to resist numerous medications. Additionally, the treatments that do work are not very precise, eliminating a variety of microorganisms, even helpful bacteria.

Paul Hergenrother and his team set out to create a medication that might overcome gram-negative bacteria’s defenses and treat illnesses while leaving other beneficial bacteria unharmed.

Starting with an antibiotic that was effective against gram-positive bacteria, the team made a number of structural changes that they thought would enable it to be effective against gram-negative infections.

While remaining largely inactive toward some gram-positive pathogens and some normally benign bacteria that reside in or on the human body, one of the modified chemicals, known as fabimycin, showed effective against more than 300 drug-resistant clinical isolates.

Furthermore, in mice with pneumonia or urinary tract infections, the novel molecule decreased the amount of drug-resistant bacteria to pre-infection levels or lower, performing as well as or better than existing medicines at comparable doses.

The findings, according to the researchers, suggest that fabimycin may one day prove to be a potent cure for difficult-to-treat infections.

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